AUTHOR Sana Khan SANA KHAN is a writer and editor living in Rio de Janeiro. A former Asian American Writers' Workshop fellow, her writing has been nominated for Best American Essays and Best of the Net. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

WRITER Sakina Aliakbar SAKINA ALIAKBAR is a writer, editor, filmmaker, actor, educator and an evolving music artist. She is based in Colombo. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

WRITER-TRANSLATOR Kabita Chakma KABITA CHAKMA is an independent researcher, writer and architect. Writing in the Chakma, Bangla and English languages, Kabita’s research interests include the history, literature, art, architecture, cinema, environmental sustainability, human rights, women’s rights and Indigenous peoples’ rights. Her academic papers have appeared in university journals and edited book chapters. Her investigative articles have appeared in the Daily Star , the New Age , Himal Southasian , the publications of various cultural and educational institutes, including the online platforms Jumjournal, thotkata.com, and alalodulal.org. Her creative works include poems and short stories. Her book of poems, Jawli Na’Udhim Kittei!/ Rukhe Darabo Na Ken! was written in Chakma and Bangla languages and translated into English by Sajed Kamal. She recently translated a short story by Shaheen Akhter, Chander Pahar (Moon Mountain) , for the magazine Out Of Print . In the context of a paucity of fictional works in indigenous CHT languages, she is now working on Chakma language historical fiction. WRITER-TRANSLATOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

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ARTIST Ikroop Sandhu IKROOP SANDHU is a graphic novelist based in Dharamshala, India. She studied Philosophy from LSR College, Delhi, and Animation from Vancouver Film School. She is the author of Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography of Bhagat Singh ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

AUTHOR Amitav Ghosh AMITAV GHOSH is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide , Gun Island and The Ibis Trilogy , consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire . The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable , a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize. His novel, Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2018 he was awarded the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. His latest book is The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Partly because of the lockdown, things were suddenly more visible. It was like a veil was lifted. There was a heightening of cases of domestic violence, for instance, which we knew about but had to deal with it. We know about power structures, but I wondered what I could do to help... Art, at a certain point, felt pointless, but I did begin to wonder what role I wanted to play. What service do I want to provide the world?” INTERACTIVE Protest Art & the Corporate Art World “Partly because of the lockdown, things were suddenly more visible. It was like a veil was lifted. There was a heightening of cases of domestic violence, for instance, which we knew about but had to deal with it. We know about power structures, but I wondered what I could do to help... Art, at a certain point, felt pointless, but I did begin to wonder what role I wanted to play. What service do I want to provide the world?” Hit Man Gurung · Isma Gul Hasan · Ikroop Sandhu As part of In Grief, In Solidarity , artist-activists Ikroop Sandhu, Isma Gul Hasan, and Hit Man Gurung discussed the various contexts in which their visual and performance artistic practice evolved with their activism in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, respectively. Working as part of collective communities and in solidarity with movements was formative for each of them. With editor Kartika Budhwar, they also discussed the “moments” (or lack thereof) that made them turn to art, and how they feel about the institutional and other problematic aspects of the rarefied art world. How does their "art" feel different from journalism and other forms of expression? How has COVID-19 affected their lives and, in turn, their practice? Each of them discussed their complex feelings about the necessity of their work—and how it felt frivolous during lockdown. At the core of the discussion was an ambivalence about the centrality of visual and performance art to activism, but also the idea that art does indeed have a specific power that other ways of engaging with the world don't. As part of In Grief, In Solidarity , artist-activists Ikroop Sandhu, Isma Gul Hasan, and Hit Man Gurung discussed the various contexts in which their visual and performance artistic practice evolved with their activism in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, respectively. Working as part of collective communities and in solidarity with movements was formative for each of them. With editor Kartika Budhwar, they also discussed the “moments” (or lack thereof) that made them turn to art, and how they feel about the institutional and other problematic aspects of the rarefied art world. How does their "art" feel different from journalism and other forms of expression? How has COVID-19 affected their lives and, in turn, their practice? Each of them discussed their complex feelings about the necessity of their work—and how it felt frivolous during lockdown. At the core of the discussion was an ambivalence about the centrality of visual and performance art to activism, but also the idea that art does indeed have a specific power that other ways of engaging with the world don't. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Kathmandu Lahore Dharamshala Panel Art Activism Art Practice Protest Art Mass Protests Feminist Art Practice Feminist In Grief In Solidarity Internationalist Perspective Aurat March Farmers' Movement People's Movement II Jana Andolan II Performance Art Monarchy 2006 Nepalese Revolution Art Institutions Museums Galleries Corporate Power Observance Grounding Corporate Interests in the Art World The Artist as Product COVID-19 HIT MAN GURUNG is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu by way of Lamjung. Gurung’s diverse practice concerns itself with the fabric of human mobilities, frictions of history, and failures of revolutions. While rooted in the recent history of Nepal, his works unravel a complex web of kinships and extraction across geographies that underscore the exploitative nature of capitalism. ISMA GUL HASAN is an illustrator from Lahore, Pakistan. She completed a Master’s in Illustration from University of the Arts London in 2020, and has worked on various storytelling and social awareness projects, including the critically acclaimed animated short, Shehr-e-Tabassum. Their personal work, which has been exhibited locally and internationally, explores otherworldly landscapes and organic forms, feminist dreams and longing, and visual manifestations of trauma and despair. hasan is currently living, teaching and creating in Karachi, Pakistan. IKROOP SANDHU is a graphic novelist based in Dharamshala, India. She studied Philosophy from LSR College, Delhi, and Animation from Vancouver Film School. She is the author of Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography of Bhagat Singh 5 Jun 2021 Live Kathmandu 5th Jun 2021 Bibi Hajra’s Spaces of Belonging Iman Iftikhar 3rd Jul A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara 5th Jun The Assessment of Veracity: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Organizing Riddhi Dastidar 5th Jun Natasha Noorani's Retro Aesthetic Natasha Noorani 5th Jun FLUX · Jaishri Abichandani's Guided Studio Tour Jaishri Abichandani 5th Dec On That Note:

TRANSLATOR Arunava Sinha ARUNAVA SINHA translates fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Bangla to English. Sixty of his translations have been published so far, with 12 of them having won or been shortlisted or longlisted for translation prizes in India and abroad. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director of the Ashoka Centre of Translation. He is based in Delhi. TRANSLATOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Anna Rabko ANNA RABKO is a graphic designer and illustrator who uses colours and surrealism as a universal language. Her education started at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Poland, creating a bond with Polish Poster design, and continued in Kathmandu, Nepal, where she learned traditional Thangka painting. She enjoys working with theatres and NGOs, and collaborating with other artists. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· FEATURES Essay · Bengal Dukkha “As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” Artwork by Haris Hidayat Ullah for SAAG. “For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake THEY are beating water. They are beating water with a hammer. I wake up with this sound in my ears. I yawn to be sure that I’m awake. I don’t know whether people yawn in their sleep. I don’t know many other things—whether the body wakes up before the mind, or whether it is possible to beat water with a hammer. But they’re beating water with a hammer. The ears must be the most alert part of our bodies? I’ve heard water speaking in different dialects before. From the sound of it being poured, I can make out how far water in a glass is from the brim; I hear buckets in neighbouring flats overflow; I hear leaking taps, disobedient drops falling to the floor from the mouth of a tap, unhurt; I hear sweat collect into drops; I hear saliva move inside mouths; I hear water breathe and sleep. But this is a different water. They are beating water . I walk out of my rented room. Outside, there’s the light, reluctant to announce itself as if it were a guest. The wind is just the opposite, seeking attention. Both invisible, invincible. What is visible is water—the river Teesta, swollen like an overworked muscle, twitching, like a nerve. But where’s the hammer? I look, but with my ears. There is the regular rhythm of water falling on water to the earth, where everything must collect. When I get out of bed—and from the dream where I was caged all night—the world is in motion. In towns and cities, that motion is triggered by time. Here, where I’ve come to escape time’s fundamentalism, it is not time that is causing motion, for water is the last of the revolutionaries, having managed to live indifferent to time. As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow —perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion? There are no mirrors in this house, and so I do not see any humans. I do not know the antonym of ‘human’, but whatever it is, it is for this that I have come here. For me, the opposite of humans is water. It is perhaps because I feel related to water, related as in being a relative. Every time I’ve tried to say this to someone, they’ve dismissed or interpreted this as a ‘poetic’ reflection. I’ve seen doctors who’ve dismissed it as a phase—like teenagers who fancy themselves as their favourite crushes on their T-shirts— and others who’ve told me that there was nothing to worry about feeling like that, for humans are indeed composed mainly of water, more than three-fifths of us. But no one really understands. The drizzle has stopped though I can see its ruins—on leaves, floors, tarpaulin. That water can fall anywhere without breaking its bones is a slap to the superiority of vertebrates. I wonder whether water, if it were animal, would be mammal or aves. Are these raindrops eggs then, or corpses? I am water not because I long to flow. I am water because no metal, no air, no music, nothing can hold my sadness like water. Water fills a teardrop like air fills a yawn. The elements rush in when they sense emptiness. My fingers are on my face again. If water could leave fossils, I imagine that this is how they’d look—these marks coursing down my face. They disappear, but not the sadness. Perhaps it is my fossil. It might have all begun with dehydration. My days in the hospital were marked by the aloneness of being inside the womb of a dark room, but without the water of the womb that enables life. Bottles of saline water hung like benevolent angels beside me, keeping watch over my life. I could see them even in the darkness—the fluorescence of water inside a plastic bottle. I heard them coax life into me, drop by drop, as if I was being created anew. I lay on my back, my spine dividing the bed like a book, thinking of strangers—writers whose words still hadn’t left me, co-passengers whose words had stuck as spit does on walls. That is the thing about sadness—its extremism, its intrusiveness, that leaves space for nothing. Sadness changes us unrecognisably even as we appear the same to the world. Humans, after all, are not like the sky—one cannot tell the climate of feelings from its body and colour. Dark clouds do not appear like boils on human bodies to indicate sadness. It was hard to believe that it was crying that had left me dehydrated. Any piece of wood becomes sweet-smelling when left in the proximity of sandalwood: this is a saying in Bangla. Left beside water for days, hearing it trickle drop by drop into my body, I became an embodiment of that. The thought of organ transplants never left me, as if this water would replace my sadness, my body’s largest organ. I could not think of it as anything but water—it came out of me as tears, snot, and sweat, the last in moments of panic and anxiety, when I felt this fear would corrode everything. I felt it inside me as one does water, in its various states, moving inside me like water, me trying to push it out as if it were gaseous, but it was like ice, solid and heavy, territorial, refusing to move, immobilising me, every thought and action. I longed for a hammer that’d allow me to break it into pieces just like the ice-candy man scraped ice. I hoped for this new water from the drip to take its place, as rain cleans the air, to fill me with life as I imagined life should be: without pain. I thought of the agents of my sadness—those I’d loved, whose understanding had now disappeared. As if I’d suddenly turned into a foreign language. I imagined their sadness as well, even as I knew that it was different from mine. I saw theirs from the outside, and recognised it from their words and gestures. From the self-centredness that suffering brings, I understood only the obvious: if sadness were a species, I belonged to its phylum. Life with watercolour, I see now, was also a life with water. What I loved most about watercolour was what I loved most about water—its unexpectedness of flow and behaviour. Even after all these years, I couldn’t be completely sure how a dab of the brush would behave on the canvas. It could spread beyond my imagined prediction, or it could remain still, like the skin of a drying pond. That was how sadness settled inside me even though I still can’t tell whether the sadness was inside or outside. Watercolour changed my perception of language. Surface tension—the physical property of water that explained its behaviour on the canvas—I now saw only as ‘tension’. Paint I came to read and hear as ‘pain’. Like people, sounds and things and expressions had begun disappearing from my life. Cohabitation meant living with, living beside. My long history of living beside water, as it helped me understand the world on canvas, and then the interminable days of lying beside the relentless drip, reminded me of possible older lives—memories stored inside the gene, like a safe deposit that would remain unused until needed. My immediate ancestors had made a life in the alluvial plains of Bengal—my mother’s paternal family on the Gangetic delta, my father’s by the Padma. In this, they were related to the first humans who built settlements by the river. I hoped that that ancient sense of water, its blood and its carefree individualism, had trickled into me in some way. They had known water simply as water; as neighbour, not as something imagined , like ice or gas. This intimacy with water had marked their relationships—not just fluidity and flow, but a natural transparency and constancy. But the river was only a memory inside me—a human memory, of calls of fear by my great grand-people, of delight in its offerings, of the sound of splashing, of rolling abundance, and also of drowning. Why has the river stopped flowing after entering me? How have I become its station? There is nothing we own as deeply as pain. That is perhaps why we’re reluctant to let it go. I’m often unable to distinguish myself from my sadness. It is not like looking in a mirror, where I know I am related to the person looking back at me, who moves when I do, who walks away when I do. That sadness can have a body and breasts and fingers and a stomach that moves in all four directions is still new to me, even after all these years. For it is hard to imagine sadness. An infant might be able to imagine many things, perhaps even its hair blowing in the wind, but it can’t imagine sadness. Why am I sad? Trying to answer this question is like looking for a black stone from amidst a large pile of black stones—the answer is there, but not identifiable to me. If I knew which stone it was, I’d throw it far away, beyond the reach of the strength of my arms and the power of my eyes. I think of possible reasons for my sadness—I pile them together like those black stones. When they topple over inside my head, I arrange them differently, like books on shelves, but nothing helps. I only feel it inside me. Sometimes, I rub my chest as if sadness were a lump that would dissolve and melt inside me. But I can’t touch it. I feel that I’ve let sadness turn to god, the way god is invisible but everywhere. Like Hindu gods, sadness is also form-changing. The pestle pounding between my breasts transforms into a leech in my throat, and soon into water in my eyes. I touch the water and stare at it sometimes. For even though it might look like the same water, the sadness is always different. Like water, like god, like a caterpillar, it is always changing form. I struggle to remember why I was sad yesterday or why I cried all night last week. When I am exhausted by its ingratitude at my having given it a home to stay, I want to throw it out. Instead, I hide it from the world as if it were a secret love. I try to remember when I first made its acquaintance but I fail. It seems I’ve known it for as long as I have known my mother. Or life. Because I don’t tell anyone about it, I cannot seek their assistance. Once or twice, a friend who sensed the wildlife of my tears over the phone, says, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor? I have a friend who benefitted from…’ I struggle the most at that moment—her words are like a laxative inside my gut, they push my sadness out violently. My face is in my hands then—I have to hide my tears from the world. I have no idea why hiding my face seemed necessary at that moment. I am embarrassed. I feel guilty. I always feel guilty for being sad. Happiness missionaries are everywhere—on my bookshelves, in my phone, in notes I have copied and written to myself. Life seems to be only about joy, about participating in ananda, in pleasure, in happiness—everything we do ought to be directed towards that sole aim. Sadness is life’s outcast, and those like me are therefore life’s outcasts too. Why tears are more private than laughter, I don’t know. I will not be able to recognise my tears, in spite of having known them for so many years, ever since I was born. They are not like blood and its groups. If they were, we might have been able to know about the group that constituted the saddest people. When a friend asks what sadness feels like, whether it’s permanent, (‘Like paralysis?’), I try to think of an appropriate metaphor and fail—‘It’s like a niggling cough inside you. You feel it there, inside your chest, waiting to come out all the time’. Nothing helps. Nothing helps. For everything might have a language—some kind of language—but sadness doesn’t. It is pre-linguistic, and hasn’t evolved since then. That is another thing that I think about often. That sadness might be my only connect with my oldest ancestors. My body, with deposits of pollutants, might not be related to theirs, their reasons for joy must have been different from mine, but I think it is our sadness that makes us true relatives. I refuse to see a doctor. A friend says: ‘You must change a shoe that pinches’. It is not the fact of my sadness being compared to a shoe that irritates me. It is their assumption that sadness can be replaced. Everyone seems to have a vague idea about what that replacement might be, but they can’t be quite sure—a spare tyre replaces a similar tyre; will another kind of sadness replace this sadness? Sadness paralyses. It is because the water freezes. How does it move then? I pose this as an anonymous question to a suicide prevention website and someone writes back immediately. I imagine the responder to be a woman, and soon after, a machine. ‘Try origami—take paper and try to fold it into a shape that resembles your sadness. Write to us after you’ve done that. Being able to do that is half your work done.’ I recoil from the aggressive tone, this ridding of sadness now so integral to me, as close as a biological child. The annoyance passes, but the thought loiters in my consciousness. I bring old newspaper and turn to my fingers—they’ve fed and cleaned me all my life, won’t they bring me some calm if they can? Stars and birds, flowers and balloons—everything can be created from folding paper, so at that point it appears that this is how god created the world, merely by folding. I’ve only ever made boats before—folding squares into triangles and pulling them inside out gently until the likeness of a boat emerged. It was a surprise every single time—the genius of folds, of lines and planes, sticking without water’s glue. And yet, no matter how much my boat-making improved with practice, the tiny boat never managed to sail without capsizing. The thinness of paper, even with its softness, fails to find appropriate support in a partner like water, it being without a spine itself. Is sadness the paper I’ll have to fold into a boat, or the water on which the boat must sail? My heart feels like a boatman trying to boat on a dried river. I cry in the shower. Water washing water, as if water were excreta—the way I heard my grandmother say bishey bishkhoy, poison kills poison. Water runs over me, touching me in places where even light struggles to enter. I close the tap from time to time but cannot leave. Water is a magnet—I know I should leave for dryness, for warmth, but I stand there waiting for more water. I am aware of my aloneness, I feel like a seed. It was possible that all seeds are as lonely as the mango stone. Loneliness had turned them hard and unwelcoming of every kind of touch, whether of blade or tongue or teeth. The opposite of this was the papaya—seeds that were soft and silky and naughty, this joy coming to them from living in a commune inside: a hundred blackish seeds. That is why hair too is never lonely—it struggles for space, but is never in want of company. The heart, on the other hand, is completely alone. One heart, one penis, one vagina. But two breasts. Was there a moral in this? Was water as lonely as me? I wouldn’t ever know, so dependent was I on this body and its inability to migrate to anything besides itself. I hated my thoughts and wanted to be rid of them. In fact, I wanted to be rid of myself. I questioned all my thoughts and actions as if they were someone else’s, even an enemy’s. I did not realise that I was lonely—I did not understand that my loneliness had pitted me against myself. It was a surprise, what I had become—like a wet and fierce wind that carves rocks, so that what we see is actually the remainder after the tussle between stone and wind, I was now a leftover of my sadness. Sadness slows down everything—it survives on echoes, for everything returns over and over again. It stammers inside, trying hard to get out. It becomes like a port of the heart, and mind that they always return to. Compared to other emotions, its pace is slow—but slow only horizontally, for it moves southwards like water does through soil. Other emotions, like the roots of trees, feed on sadness urgently. They change immediately, for sadness is a powerful catalyst: it changes its surroundings without itself changing. I try to understand sadness through physics—taking away a piece of brick will result in exactly the same volume of air taking its place. The disappearance of a person leaves sadness that is far greater than the physical volume of the person. How does that happen? Science fails, I fail. To carry the size and weight of sadness that is bigger and heavier than one’s body; it was sadness that Sisyphus was trying to push up the mountain. I have this image: I’m standing at the top of a hill, about to jump off, but I can’t. I think it is sadness that glues me to the spot for sadness is an addiction. I’ve become a parasite to this sadness. I must remain alive to keep my sadness alive. I don’t know why they call it stream-of-consciousness. Lately, every time water from my paintbrush has leaked onto the canvas, that phrase has come up. Information doesn’t interest me—they are like nails that break for being too long, the fact of this phrase coming from William James’s revolutionary book. Did he actually mean stream of sadness when he said consciousness? Was he sad when he coined the phrase? But at times it doesn’t feel like a stream but a waterfall—water hurting water, sadness hitting sadness. I’m teaching my nephew to draw water. Next to him is a box of watercolours. We are rubbing water—with a brush, of course—on a blue tablet to produce blue water: adding water to produce water, a version of sexual reproduction as it were, humans producing humans, plants producing plants, like producing like. (That is the nature of reproduction: to produce versions of oneself. Only the sun is different. We, in all our varied forms, are its offspring, but we don’t resemble it.) The little boy takes the brush and pulls it from one end of the page to the other until its bluish stains mark the page. He promptly calls them water’s pimples. He’s angry when I laugh at his diagnosis. Scolded, I ask for a cure—water, he says, and pours the entire bowl on the page, and, of course, the drawing book. The flooded page is put under a patch of sunlight. There it dries unequally, crinkling, losing its flatness. We imagine land as we do water—flatness pleases us, it makes us feel powerful. Sharp undulations, prickliness, bristliness—they trouble us. This comes to us from our body which wants smooth surfaces; even a tiny grain of sand can keep us awake. The eye, like our back, seeks plain surfaces. There is aaram in looking at a straight line instead of jagged lines. But water is neither straight nor jagged. It is a moving line. The closest approximation of water’s movement on land is that of ants moving in a line, untouched by the push and rush of time. For many things move water—feet and machines, pumps and pipes, but time has no power over water’s movement. Time cannot move water, like it cannot move sadness. Another day we try again. This time land is sandwiched between two blocks of blue—water and sky. One of these he can see—and so it is not hard for him to be faithful: he looks outside the window, the blue sky is squatting there as always. He needs no tutoring, no demands are made on the imagination. Blue must be coloured blue. But water, silent in the bowl next to him, is colourless. Why must he colour it blue? It is a lie, he thinks. I try to paraphrase the Raman effect for him, but it’s like chanting a mantra to prove the existence of god. Water can be any colour, he says, and then demonstrates—dipping the brush into the colours one by one, letting it leak and dissolve into the bowl. Water collects all the colours. There’s nothing more accommodative than water. It is more elastic than even the human heart. ‘Making a bucket is a lot of work. Anything that holds water demands a lot of work.’ It is Rath Yatra, and I’m at a small fair that accompanies it every year. The fairs of my childhood are gone—clay, iron and tin toys have now been replaced by plastic. Almost everything squeaks, or runs on battery. I’ve come here to buy clay utensils—miniatures, toys for children. Utensils, fruits and vegetables, even houses with sloping roofs—most of these things don’t exist anymore, not even in villages. They are a part of folk memory, on their way to turning into nostalgia, a space as inert as a museum. This man sits in a corner. He is a remainder, and reminder, from an older time, when men trusted their hands, and when they blamed their poverty on destiny and not the government. In front of him are three kinds of things: kulo, boti, balti, the first for winnowing, separating grain from husk, the second a kind of flat bladed knife, used by sitting on the floor; the third is a toy tin bucket. For the bucket he asks for twenty rupees. Scared that I might bargain, he adds: "Anything that holds water demands a lot of work." It is folk knowledge that it always rains on the day of Rath Yatra. But there is not a cloud in the sky. That humidity which makes rain possible has landed on earth,. Around me is a blind crowd, blind because, like me, they do not know where we’re all going. We’re being pushed, and are pushing each other without will. We are sweating, we have become clouds. People are eager to touch the rope that pulls Jagannath and his siblings. It is endearing, this sacredness of a rope, how belief transforms the common into a thing of wonder. It is what love does too. I notice that the priest who’s sitting in the "ground storey" of the Rath is carrying a black umbrella. But the rains don’t come. It is as if we’ve become skies—water is flowing out of us relentlessly. The man’s words don’t leave me—how difficult it is to create anything that holds water. I kept thinking of god as the old man spoke, and how hard it must have been for him to design our eyes that hold tears. "Because you can’t carry water in everything after all." I’ve watched time lapses of water solidifying into ice. It is still a thing of wonder for me, for I was born into a household that did not have a fridge until I was seven. It was a magic machine. The magician P.C. Sorcar visited Siliguri almost every winter. We watched him cut human bodies into pieces and put them back together, the people, who were dead only a while ago now walked back to their seats in the auditorium. I thought of the fridge as akin to the magician—it could change unwieldy, liquid water into solid square cubes. But, like Sorcar, the fridge kept its technique hidden from me—it would freeze water only with its door closed. These time-lapse videos affect my body. I find that I swallow my saliva more often. I see water freezing into ice and I imagine this is how pain coagulates into sadness inside me. I remember looking at the icy peaks of the Himalayas from the balcony of my rented apartment overlooking Darjeeling’s Happy Valley Tea Estate. When I couldn’t see them clearly, I realised it wasn’t just my clinical myopia but the water in my eyes, which surprised me with its inexhaustibility. At first I dip just my head in the old iron bucket. It is cold—the water feels like metal, cold, solid, and resistant to any entry. When I force my head in, it tries to expel my head out of the bucket. I try again—I push my head in and then pull it out when the resistance seems too strong to bear. My head doesn’t learn to swim. One thing I take from this with some relief, even joy, is how water drowns out and distorts almost all surrounding sound. For a moment, perhaps because of the unexpectedness of the impact, it drowns out the sounds inside my head as well. I immediately begin thinking of this as a cure—this dunking my head in water every time sadness paralyses me. I remember my mother pouring water on my head and forehead to bring down my fever. I will trust in water too. Later, as the day wears warmer clothes, I walk to the river and sit on a rock. My feet enter the water. The river doesn’t push back like the water in the bucket. Head and feet—these are our extreme points, where tiredness accumulates the fastest. But how different the aches, and how different their cures. The water, even though it is colder than my body, as it mostly is when we meet in natural conditions, doesn’t seem as foreign to my feet as it did to my head. I do not know why. All my life I have allowed the water poured over my head to run to my feet. I read that the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end because of water shortage. Civilisations can end because of water. Can sadness end for the same reason? I am sleepy. Sleep feels like a pencil whose nib breaks every day. The history of hurt remains unrecorded. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Bengal Personal History Holding Water Epistemology Trauma Temporality Water Sadness Depictions of Grief Grief Essay Form Experimental Methods Banality William Blake Teesta Disaster & Language Intimacy & Disaster River Guilt Privacy Siliguri Loneliness Stream of Consciousness Watercolor Rath Yatra Memory P. C. Sorcar Darjeeling Himalayas Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 4th Jul 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

ARTIST Tara Anand TARA ANAND is an illustrator and visual artist from Bombay, currently based in New York. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. THE VERTICAL The Ambivalent Voter Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. Jeevan Ravindran “Let’s say a small child of around five years old is sick,” says Subramaniam Maheswarie, a 47-year-old tea plucker from Bogawantalawa in the Nuwara Eliya district of Sri Lanka’s Central Province. “We have to look after it and give it medicine.” The sick child Maheswarie is referring to is Sri Lanka: a nation on the slow road to recovery from a devastating economic crisis that led to shortages of food and fuel, and saw costs of living soar. The doctor who nursed the child is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the president who took the reins from Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from office after months of protests. Wickremesinghe is attempting to hold onto power after two years in office as the country gears up for a presidential election tomorrow, 21st September, the first since the crisis. Such conditions are ripe for the playing out of patronage politics. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest plantation workers’ trade union, is advocating fiercely on Wickremesinghe’s behalf. Last year, the leader of the CWC was elevated to the position of a cabinet minister by Wickremesinghe’s government, and CWC formed a seat-sharing pact with the UNP (United National Party) aiming to garner votes in the central plantation districts. Maheswarie serves as a local chairwoman for the CWC, although she also continues to work on the plantation. Here in the hill-country region, political parties double as trade unions and vice versa—simultaneously trying to win workers’ votes as well as represent their voices in negotiations with plantations. In May this year, Wickremesinghe promised plantation workers a new wage of LKR 1,700 (US$5.64), a 70% hike from their current wage of LKR 1000 (US$3.32). Plantation companies appealed the wage, and Wickremesinghe’s presidential gazette was found to be unlawful by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. The Wages Board has now issued a gazette mandating wages of LKR 1,350 (US$4.48) for plantation workers, with an additional productivity incentive of LKR 350 (US$1.16) that requires them to pluck extra kilos. Tea workers, most of whom are part of the Malaiyaha Tamil community—descendants of indentured labourers brought from South India to work on plantations by the British in colonial Ceylon—face a number of challenges including food insecurity, lack of access to educational opportunities, precarious housing, and poor living and working conditions. Maheswarie says the wage increase is positive, but admits that the last wage increase in 2021 led to problems for workers. She says productivity targets increased by 3 kilos at her plantation. Additionally, benefits such as medical care and food provisions were withdrawn or reduced, because the implementation of the new wage led to the collapse of the traditional collective agreement between plantation companies and trade unions. “[As part of the collective agreement], there were a lot of rules and regulations regarding what you should and shouldn’t do with workers,” Maheswarie says. “Now those rules don’t exist. Once we got rid of those rules, it was the companies who [arbitrarily] set the rules. Now that we don’t have the collective agreement, we can’t really go and argue [for more benefits].” Many workers are suspicious of the timing of the wage increase, perceiving it as a political ploy to win their votes in the election. However, Maheswarie is adamant that is not the case and accuses plantation companies of “dragging out” the process to frame the CWC as eking out a wage increase for political gain. Roshan Rajadurai, chairman of the Planters’ Association, which oversees hundreds of plantations in Sri Lanka, said targets would not increase. However, he also said productivity must be improved and that the wage increase was unsustainable. “In Sri Lanka, rationale and reason don’t, unfortunately, apply,” Rajadurai said. He questioned the announcement, saying the plantation sector was being “singled out.” He pointed out that wages for other sectors were not being increased. “We have to agree on something we can [actually] pay,” Rajadurai added. “If they [politicians] did everything they promised, Sri Lanka would be better than Singapore.” He refuted Maheswarie’s claim that benefits were being reduced for workers, saying welfare had actually been increased and that it was in the plantations’ best interests to look after their workers. According to Sri Lanka’s Tea Board, the industry contributed USD 1.26 billion to the Sri Lankan economy in 2022. However, plantation workers were severely hit by the crisis, with many struggling to afford basic necessities. “The election is coming, right? So they likely thought we’d only vote for them if they increased our salaries,” says Santhiappillai Mary, who works at the Loolecondera estate, a state-owned plantation in Kandy District, famously colonial Ceylon’s first tea estate. Mary is unmoved by Loolecondera's storied history. She shares that the plantation makes multiple deductions from workers’ salaries, including small amounts for the work cards they register their picked tea leaf kilograms on and, until recently, for their payslips. She has taken out multiple loans by now and is berated by the companies involved when she cannot pay. She often goes to work even when she is sick or it is raining heavily—simply because she cannot afford to miss a day of pay. “We have to take two meals to work, but sometimes, if I take two meals, my children don’t have enough food to eat at home,” Mary says. “So, I just take one meal and go. And sometimes I don’t take anything at all, because the children need food in the evening. I’ve done that, too.” Santhiappillai Mary, courtesy of Udara Pathum Such dire straits also affect access to free public services. In 2022, Mary’s oldest son had to drop out of school. After her family could not afford the bus fare to school, he was not permitted to advance to the next grade alongside his peers. In Agarapatana, local trade union leaders who were part of the National Union of Workers (NUW) are also not totally convinced by the wage increase. NUW has thrown its support behind presidential hopeful Sajith Premadasa, who has promised to turn estate workers into smallholders and increase their pay. “We can’t be sure we’re going to get the new wage,” said Dayalan Ravichandran, adding that he was surprised to see that he received the same salary in June even after Wickremesinghe promised a higher wage. “They say they’ve agreed to it, but it’s not definite yet. We don’t know if they’re just doing it because of the election.” One estate trade union leader said people’s votes were often won with alcohol, even within her own party. “The people in the party give alcohol to the chairmen and tell them to give it to the men,” she said, adding that the women were struggling without basic facilities. “The chairmen give alcohol to the men and tell them to vote for the party.” But perhaps the larger question is: Would a wage increase even shift the needle for tea workers? If even universal education—which Sri Lanka cites as a major source of pride in comparison to its South Asian neighbours—can seemingly be revoked for tea workers’ children for want of bus fare, can tea workers reasonably aspire to the end of generational poverty in the hill country? Tea leaves at a plantation in Kandy District, Central Province. Courtesy of Udara Pathum. Workers might be divided in their political preferences but are united on one issue. None of them believe the wage increase—of which proof will only emerge after the election when next month’s pay is given—will be definitive proof of improved conditions. Mary feels that any wage increase is unlikely to be the better prospect it’s touted to be. “If they increase the salary,” she says, “they’ll demand more kilos of tea leaves, so it’s difficult for the workers.” She adds that an increase in salary will also mean an increase in the cost of essentials. “So there’s no point in increasing the salary. However much we get, it’s not enough.” This linkage of wage increases to required increases in productivity demands is the root of tea workers’ misgivings about their financial future: indeed, a wage increase may well be thought of as an excuse for the extraction of surplus labour that exceeds the limits of bodily labour. Mahendran, 49, also a worker at Loolecondera, says his family often goes hungry for five or six days every month. He, too, believes estates will increase productivity targets in response to the wage increase, adding that workers “can’t work any more than this.” Rajadurai, the Planters’ Association chair, disagrees. “People are not willing to increase their productivity. Our productivity is the lowest in the world,” he says, comparing expectations for tea pluckers in Sri Lanka favourably to Assam, where he claims tea pluckers have to pluck far more. He argues that pluckers should be able to pluck 1 kilo in 12 minutes.“If they want to earn, they earn.” Pluckers, he says, “should not get into the mindset that 18 is an impossible target.” When informed that tea pluckers said they had a daily target of 13 kilograms before the 2021 wage increase, Rajadurai told SAAG: “What are they doing plucking 13 kilos for the whole day? It’s absurd.” If estates and plantation companies increase productivity targets with wage increases, the much-touted increase can arguably be equated not just to an effective wage stagnation but also a more significant risk to the lives and bodies of tea workers and their families. The firm productivity targets tied to the 2021 wage increase demonstrably taxed workers with less flexibility than before. Many workers say the work was harder after the wage increase. Maheswarie says that estates no longer weed the tea bushes properly. Instead, they expect workers to do so and then pluck 18 kilograms on top of that. Ramalingam Priyadharshini, 42, a tea plucker from Agarapatana, is still undecided about who to vote for. She’s been let down in the past by promises to fix the roads in her area and to build housing. Currently, her family has no toilet. Priyadharshini has to use the toilet at her mother’s house, a ten-minute walk away. At night, or in an emergency, she has to ask her neighbours if she can use theirs. “I’m wondering whether I should just not vote at all because our main problem is the road. But it’s only during election time that they come and say they’ll do everything for us,” says Ramalingam. Her mother, Palanimurthy Jeyam, is a retired tea plucker who plans to spoil her ballot after years of involvement with CWC as a local chairwoman. “The current government is only doing everything for the rich,” she says angrily. “But they’re letting the hungry people go hungry and die.” Mary also says she doesn’t feel hopeful that anything will change. Meanwhile, Priyadharshini argues that the state only really thinks of plantation workers when election campaigns are underway, a sentiment that brings to the fore the historical trend, since independence, of Sri Lankan political parties jockeying for power during election campaigns by promising welfare services like food subsidies and wage increases. Indeed, tomorrow’s election may well show the risk of taking plantation workers’ votes for granted—or their successful co-optation by trade unions.∎ Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. “Let’s say a small child of around five years old is sick,” says Subramaniam Maheswarie, a 47-year-old tea plucker from Bogawantalawa in the Nuwara Eliya district of Sri Lanka’s Central Province. “We have to look after it and give it medicine.” The sick child Maheswarie is referring to is Sri Lanka: a nation on the slow road to recovery from a devastating economic crisis that led to shortages of food and fuel, and saw costs of living soar. The doctor who nursed the child is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the president who took the reins from Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from office after months of protests. Wickremesinghe is attempting to hold onto power after two years in office as the country gears up for a presidential election tomorrow, 21st September, the first since the crisis. Such conditions are ripe for the playing out of patronage politics. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest plantation workers’ trade union, is advocating fiercely on Wickremesinghe’s behalf. Last year, the leader of the CWC was elevated to the position of a cabinet minister by Wickremesinghe’s government, and CWC formed a seat-sharing pact with the UNP (United National Party) aiming to garner votes in the central plantation districts. Maheswarie serves as a local chairwoman for the CWC, although she also continues to work on the plantation. Here in the hill-country region, political parties double as trade unions and vice versa—simultaneously trying to win workers’ votes as well as represent their voices in negotiations with plantations. In May this year, Wickremesinghe promised plantation workers a new wage of LKR 1,700 (US$5.64), a 70% hike from their current wage of LKR 1000 (US$3.32). Plantation companies appealed the wage, and Wickremesinghe’s presidential gazette was found to be unlawful by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. The Wages Board has now issued a gazette mandating wages of LKR 1,350 (US$4.48) for plantation workers, with an additional productivity incentive of LKR 350 (US$1.16) that requires them to pluck extra kilos. Tea workers, most of whom are part of the Malaiyaha Tamil community—descendants of indentured labourers brought from South India to work on plantations by the British in colonial Ceylon—face a number of challenges including food insecurity, lack of access to educational opportunities, precarious housing, and poor living and working conditions. Maheswarie says the wage increase is positive, but admits that the last wage increase in 2021 led to problems for workers. She says productivity targets increased by 3 kilos at her plantation. Additionally, benefits such as medical care and food provisions were withdrawn or reduced, because the implementation of the new wage led to the collapse of the traditional collective agreement between plantation companies and trade unions. “[As part of the collective agreement], there were a lot of rules and regulations regarding what you should and shouldn’t do with workers,” Maheswarie says. “Now those rules don’t exist. Once we got rid of those rules, it was the companies who [arbitrarily] set the rules. Now that we don’t have the collective agreement, we can’t really go and argue [for more benefits].” Many workers are suspicious of the timing of the wage increase, perceiving it as a political ploy to win their votes in the election. However, Maheswarie is adamant that is not the case and accuses plantation companies of “dragging out” the process to frame the CWC as eking out a wage increase for political gain. Roshan Rajadurai, chairman of the Planters’ Association, which oversees hundreds of plantations in Sri Lanka, said targets would not increase. However, he also said productivity must be improved and that the wage increase was unsustainable. “In Sri Lanka, rationale and reason don’t, unfortunately, apply,” Rajadurai said. He questioned the announcement, saying the plantation sector was being “singled out.” He pointed out that wages for other sectors were not being increased. “We have to agree on something we can [actually] pay,” Rajadurai added. “If they [politicians] did everything they promised, Sri Lanka would be better than Singapore.” He refuted Maheswarie’s claim that benefits were being reduced for workers, saying welfare had actually been increased and that it was in the plantations’ best interests to look after their workers. According to Sri Lanka’s Tea Board, the industry contributed USD 1.26 billion to the Sri Lankan economy in 2022. However, plantation workers were severely hit by the crisis, with many struggling to afford basic necessities. “The election is coming, right? So they likely thought we’d only vote for them if they increased our salaries,” says Santhiappillai Mary, who works at the Loolecondera estate, a state-owned plantation in Kandy District, famously colonial Ceylon’s first tea estate. Mary is unmoved by Loolecondera's storied history. She shares that the plantation makes multiple deductions from workers’ salaries, including small amounts for the work cards they register their picked tea leaf kilograms on and, until recently, for their payslips. She has taken out multiple loans by now and is berated by the companies involved when she cannot pay. She often goes to work even when she is sick or it is raining heavily—simply because she cannot afford to miss a day of pay. “We have to take two meals to work, but sometimes, if I take two meals, my children don’t have enough food to eat at home,” Mary says. “So, I just take one meal and go. And sometimes I don’t take anything at all, because the children need food in the evening. I’ve done that, too.” Santhiappillai Mary, courtesy of Udara Pathum Such dire straits also affect access to free public services. In 2022, Mary’s oldest son had to drop out of school. After her family could not afford the bus fare to school, he was not permitted to advance to the next grade alongside his peers. In Agarapatana, local trade union leaders who were part of the National Union of Workers (NUW) are also not totally convinced by the wage increase. NUW has thrown its support behind presidential hopeful Sajith Premadasa, who has promised to turn estate workers into smallholders and increase their pay. “We can’t be sure we’re going to get the new wage,” said Dayalan Ravichandran, adding that he was surprised to see that he received the same salary in June even after Wickremesinghe promised a higher wage. “They say they’ve agreed to it, but it’s not definite yet. We don’t know if they’re just doing it because of the election.” One estate trade union leader said people’s votes were often won with alcohol, even within her own party. “The people in the party give alcohol to the chairmen and tell them to give it to the men,” she said, adding that the women were struggling without basic facilities. “The chairmen give alcohol to the men and tell them to vote for the party.” But perhaps the larger question is: Would a wage increase even shift the needle for tea workers? If even universal education—which Sri Lanka cites as a major source of pride in comparison to its South Asian neighbours—can seemingly be revoked for tea workers’ children for want of bus fare, can tea workers reasonably aspire to the end of generational poverty in the hill country? Tea leaves at a plantation in Kandy District, Central Province. Courtesy of Udara Pathum. Workers might be divided in their political preferences but are united on one issue. None of them believe the wage increase—of which proof will only emerge after the election when next month’s pay is given—will be definitive proof of improved conditions. Mary feels that any wage increase is unlikely to be the better prospect it’s touted to be. “If they increase the salary,” she says, “they’ll demand more kilos of tea leaves, so it’s difficult for the workers.” She adds that an increase in salary will also mean an increase in the cost of essentials. “So there’s no point in increasing the salary. However much we get, it’s not enough.” This linkage of wage increases to required increases in productivity demands is the root of tea workers’ misgivings about their financial future: indeed, a wage increase may well be thought of as an excuse for the extraction of surplus labour that exceeds the limits of bodily labour. Mahendran, 49, also a worker at Loolecondera, says his family often goes hungry for five or six days every month. He, too, believes estates will increase productivity targets in response to the wage increase, adding that workers “can’t work any more than this.” Rajadurai, the Planters’ Association chair, disagrees. “People are not willing to increase their productivity. Our productivity is the lowest in the world,” he says, comparing expectations for tea pluckers in Sri Lanka favourably to Assam, where he claims tea pluckers have to pluck far more. He argues that pluckers should be able to pluck 1 kilo in 12 minutes.“If they want to earn, they earn.” Pluckers, he says, “should not get into the mindset that 18 is an impossible target.” When informed that tea pluckers said they had a daily target of 13 kilograms before the 2021 wage increase, Rajadurai told SAAG: “What are they doing plucking 13 kilos for the whole day? It’s absurd.” If estates and plantation companies increase productivity targets with wage increases, the much-touted increase can arguably be equated not just to an effective wage stagnation but also a more significant risk to the lives and bodies of tea workers and their families. The firm productivity targets tied to the 2021 wage increase demonstrably taxed workers with less flexibility than before. Many workers say the work was harder after the wage increase. Maheswarie says that estates no longer weed the tea bushes properly. Instead, they expect workers to do so and then pluck 18 kilograms on top of that. Ramalingam Priyadharshini, 42, a tea plucker from Agarapatana, is still undecided about who to vote for. She’s been let down in the past by promises to fix the roads in her area and to build housing. Currently, her family has no toilet. Priyadharshini has to use the toilet at her mother’s house, a ten-minute walk away. At night, or in an emergency, she has to ask her neighbours if she can use theirs. “I’m wondering whether I should just not vote at all because our main problem is the road. But it’s only during election time that they come and say they’ll do everything for us,” says Ramalingam. Her mother, Palanimurthy Jeyam, is a retired tea plucker who plans to spoil her ballot after years of involvement with CWC as a local chairwoman. “The current government is only doing everything for the rich,” she says angrily. “But they’re letting the hungry people go hungry and die.” Mary also says she doesn’t feel hopeful that anything will change. Meanwhile, Priyadharshini argues that the state only really thinks of plantation workers when election campaigns are underway, a sentiment that brings to the fore the historical trend, since independence, of Sri Lankan political parties jockeying for power during election campaigns by promising welfare services like food subsidies and wage increases. Indeed, tomorrow’s election may well show the risk of taking plantation workers’ votes for granted—or their successful co-optation by trade unions.∎ Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making “Into tea forest I,” 2024. Pen and tea stain on brown board, 91.4cm x 121.9cm, part of a triptych. Courtesy of Arulraj Ulaganathan. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Dispatch Sri Lanka Plantation Workers Tea Estates Ceylon Workers Congress Ranil Wickremasinghe UNP Central Province Malaiyaha Tamil Community Indentured Labor Agricultural Labor Agriculture Plantations Labor Wage Labor Wages Political Agendas Patronage Politics Clientelism Surplus Value Productivity Demands Production Planters’ Association Political Economy Loolecondera Kandy District Nuwara Eliya District Political Parties False Promises Effective Wage Stagnation JEEVAN RAVINDRAN is a multimedia journalist based in Jaffna and London, with bylines in VICE , Reuters , CNN, and more. She reports on human rights and politics. 20 Sept 2024 Dispatch Sri Lanka 20th Sep 2024 ARULRAJ ULAGANATHAN is a member of the Malaiyaga Tamil tea plantation worker community, and an artist. His work has previously been exhibited at the JDA Perera Gallery, the Kochi Muziris Student Biennale, and Colomboscope. His most recent solo exhibition, "A Life in Tea" at Barefoot Gallery Colombo, combines elements from the tea estates, such as name cards, tea pruning knives, and bruised feet. Sinking the Body Politic Dipanjan Sinha 24th Aug The Uneasy Dreamscape of Katchatheevu Jeevan Ravindran 16th Jun Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya Harshana Rambukwella 27th Feb India's Vector Capitalism Model Anumeha Yadav 5th Jun Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement Sangeet Toor 29th Apr On That Note: